


Vital Signs

by f_m_r_l



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Great Hiatus, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-15
Packaged: 2017-12-11 23:26:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/804460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/f_m_r_l/pseuds/f_m_r_l
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The strands of Moriarty's web are being pulled down one by one. A riff on the idea of identifying features and the conclusions they point to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vital Signs

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Post Mortem](https://archiveofourown.org/works/398431) by [keerawa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keerawa/pseuds/keerawa). 



> Thanks to my beta and britpicker, [yalublyutebya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yalublyutebya/pseuds/yalublyutebya).
> 
> Additional thanks to my consultants on secure government computing facilities....you know who you are. I'd list them, but they'd kill me. Notice I didn't even say "have to kill me".

" _He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organised. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed—the word is passed to the Professor, the matter is organised and carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case money is found for his bail or his defence. But the central power which uses the agent is never caught—never so much as suspected. This was the organisation which I deduced, Watson, and which I devoted my whole energy to exposing and breaking up._ "

—The Final Problem, Arthur Conan Doyle

Long after a spider is gone, strands of a web may remain intact, more visible without a cunning spider to spin them fresh.

* * *

 **Jenna Hobson**  
  
Visiting Professor Hottie!  
Like • Comment • Share   
2 minutes ago

Jenna glared at her phone, at the place where her picture of Professor Verner wasn't. She'd tried three times to upload it to Facebook (with the post privacy settings restricted to her sister and her best friend, since calling him 'Visiting Professor Hottie' was likely to be seen as unprofessional). It had been hard enough to sneak the picture without Verner noticing. Fortunately, he'd stopped to talk with Professor Peters after the most recent departmental meeting.

Jenna was sure she knew the topic of conversation without hearing a word of it. Peters would have been crowing about his grants. Jenna might have sold her soul to know how to be as good at procuring funding as Peters was. When she'd joined the faculty she'd tried to get some tips from him; a common mistake, something most of the department had done. After a few conversations with Peters, Jenna wished it was as easy as bargaining with the devil; there was nothing to be gained by trying to get useful information from Peters.

But even if Verner had obtained nothing from his conversation with Peters, Jenna had what she wanted; Verner had stood still long enough for a discreet picture. She'd been a little disappointed during uploading when facial recognition hadn't tried to match the picture up with any other pictures of Verner. Surely the university he usually worked at had its own share of mandatory faculty events and departmental photos? Maybe the lack of facial recognition was connected with the way that even though Facebook _said_ the picture was uploading, it obviously hadn't worked.

The part of her brain that was too easily amused pondered the myth that vampires could not be photographed, and how awkward that would be in today's society. Verner was certainly pale, gaunt, and charismatic enough. Something to mention to Brian in Pop Culture Studies — he might get a laugh out of it.

She tried uploading a picture of her cat. It worked perfectly, so there wasn't anything consistently wrong with either her phone or Facebook.

Then the screen went black.

She didn't have time for this. Her next class was going to be starting in fifteen minutes, halfway across the campus.

She arrived slightly late and somewhat out of breath, then had the annoyance of making it through class without any of her notes, the silent flashing alarm that warned her when it was time to wrap things up and hand out assignments, or even her calendar with the assignments and due dates on it. She knew she should have invested in a tablet. And maybe a watch. But who needed a wristwatch when they had a phone? She was so unused to checking the clock at the back of the hall that it took students turning around to confirm it matched their own devices before she realized that she had continued lecturing past the end of the class period.

Later, in her office, it turned out that plugging the phone in to recharge for a bit, taking the battery out and putting it back in, and pressing against the battery while trying to start the phone all had no effect, not even when she tried blowing off the battery before replacing it. She shoved her SIM card into an old phone she kept for emergencies, then realized that she hadn't kept the phone charged and that the charger was... well, it took a moment or two of mental rummaging to remember that the charger was probably in the passenger side door pocket of her car.

So it wasn't until she was most of the way home that she received the text about the emergency departmental meeting. It turned out that her phone was the least of her problems for that day. The department had just lost a tenured Professor, Jim Peters; a Visiting Professor, Verner; and possibly some grad students. Classes needed to be covered, university positions on comments to the press clarified, and the faculty and staff informed of the events.

As she returned to work, Jenna saw news trucks in one of the staff parking lots and news people facing off against campus security. The situation might have been about to heat up; the tow truck in her rearview mirror turned into the lot as she drove past. Fortunately, the parking near her destination was empty of all but staff vehicles and a few other stragglers hustling toward the doors and out of the cold.

The conference room was packed by the time she squeezed in, warmer than the halls outside from sheer body heat. Almost everyone clutched a cup of tea, hot chocolate, or coffee, something warm. The scents filled the air, combining with the smell of damp winter clothing. But as the chair's administrative assistant pressed back into the room carrying an armful of equipment, Jenna could still tell that she smelled slightly of whiskey and cigarettes. Not a good sign. Neither was the fact that the chair wasn't there. One of the senior professors called the meeting to order in her place.

The department had been tipped off that textual analysis showed startling similarities between Verner's work and that of an infamous fraud, now deceased. Verner resigned upon being asked about it. Had Verner lifted Sherlock Holmes's work, filed the serial numbers off, and published it as Cultural Anthropology studies? There was no absolute proof, but as Verner was making no effort to defend his work, there didn't need to be.

Professor Peters was more of a problem. His name was strongly linked with the university's. The university had made every effort to publicize the news of his work and the grants he'd won. Students came to the university to work with the famous (and well-funded) James Peters. And now Professor James Peters was more famous than ever before. His name was all over the headlines, as a matter of fact. People who had never heard of the university before were hearing about it in the international news.

The earliest article had appeared right after the campus offices closed for the day, which was the university's first break. Nobody could expect so much as a "no comment" from the institution as a whole when the offices were closed. The second was that one of the PostDocs had news alerts on each and every member of the faculty texted directly to his phone. He'd been able to contact the department chair before most of the professors who'd been on campus had left. She was now in a teleconference with the university president, a PR person, and the entirety of the board of trustees.

James Peters had done some very successful archaeological digs in an area of the world best known for its bribery, corruption, and terrorist groups. It was taken as a matter-of-course that a large amount of money went into making certain the site was secure and the dig was approved; if Professor Peters' dig had gone under due to unreasonable demands for bribes and protection money beyond what he could pay, it wouldn't have been the first dig to do so. But the grants he received had covered all of those needs, and when he needed more money, the money had been forthcoming from odd little grants nobody had heard of and from private donors.

It had all been a front. Oh, the work was genuine enough, but it would forever be tainted. The private donors and obscure grants had been people using Peters to funnel money to overseas terrorist organizations in the region where he worked. Peters had cooperated knowingly. He'd confessed. The money was doing exactly what he'd intended to use it for, after all — facilitating the dig. Nobody in that area was going to mess with the terrorists or their supplier. His digs went smoothly.

The investigators were "talking with" some of his grad students, who were "cooperating with" the investigation. Apparently this meant the investigators had reason to suspect some of the students could be involved. How many of the grad students would be available to cover their responsibilities during the coming days was not certain. If any would be gone for good was not certain. What to do about the grad students whose work consisted entirely of a subset of Professor Peters' work was also not certain. This _was not_ going to make their department a more popular choice to pursue one's post-graduate studies.

And there was evidence that _somebody_ inside the department had channelled information to the police and Homeland Security, first, instead of going to the department chair. That was absolutely intolerable. The intradepartmental politics were about to get incredibly bloody, just when they needed to find someone reliable and discreet to fill in for the rest of the semester (three weeks before finals, and the students in those sections would all be pitching fits), just when they needed to present a united face to the outside world.

It was over a week before Jenna was able to take her phone in to the shop. By that time she was too tired to even fuss when she was told that everything, including her memory card, had been wiped by a virus, and the best thing they could do was to give her a fresh slate with the basic setup. Her calendar, her notes, everything important was backed up. So she lost a few photos. After the first few days of her stint on the interview committee, she never wanted to think of Professor Verner again.

* * *

Lysander glided about the changing room, a swan among swans, getting a quote here, a name there, and a number of appraising looks from the models brought in for this shoot. It was a mark of how green some of these girls were; they obviously couldn't tell that Lysander's jawline was just as fake as his name probably was, that he was a mere documentary filmmaker and not someone who could help them with their careers in fashion, and that either way he wasn't likely to be interested in one of _them_. You could tell by the way he spent so much time fussing around Frederick, the assistant designer, asking him questions, having him show off the costume jewelry when Thaddeus, who had designed the jewelry, was _right there_.

But honestly, really, the man was so artificial that even the shape of his ears changed slightly from day to day. It wasn't unheard of to use makeup to accentuate a feature here, de-accentuate a feature there, maybe fudge the shape of some bone structure that wasn't quite what one would wish. And some people were desperate enough to get chin implants and cheekbone implants, or use a few different tricks to simulate them until they could find both the money and the time to change things. Thaddeus wished he had the name of whoever had done Lysander's cheekbones. But ears? Who used special effects makeup on their ears?

Thaddeus knew jealousy wasn't a good look on him — his face tended to end up blotchy — and he turned away until he could feel his complexion cooling again.

While his back was turned, Lysander left the room, but that was lost in all the commotion as the police entered the room. They moved with purpose toward Frederick and the jewelry. When Matthaios, the head designer, found that the police were intent on taking both his assistant designer and his accessory collection, he started shouting. Two of the models fainted. Matthaios incorporated the fact that the models weren't being paid to faint into his rant. The shoot was turning into a very expensive disaster.

Ten months later, Thaddeus was designing a "fun, fresh, and affordable" line of jewelry for a large chain store. It wasn't the scandal of Frederick smuggling drugs in Thaddeus's jewelry designs that had taken down Matthaios's empire; it was the expense and chaos of having the police halt every single facet of production, import, and export for an investigation just before fashion week. Thaddeus had been the focus of an extended investigation himself while the police determined that he'd actually paid little attention to the details of what Frederick was handling, just to the legitimate end results. Lysander was also under investigation, of course, since he'd disappeared right before the bust. But Thaddeus had word from inside the investigation that they'd only ever found a partial fingerprint on some special effects putty, putty that had apparently been shaped to alter the appearance of the _inside_ of Lysander's ears.

Thaddeus told himself that he was well away from all of that. He was actually making more money for himself now. He wasn't working with high end fashion models anymore, but he was through with playing up to the egos of anorexic children anyway. And when he wasn't spending all of his waking hours dealing with the fashion industry, many of the people he met were kinder. He'd met a woman in advertising who had warmth, curves, and an understanding of the demands of his job. This could really work out for the better.

There was a coverup later, when even the one piece of evidence of Lysander's existence vanished from police custody, but by that time Thaddeus was no longer "in the know".

* * *

Captain Nathan Johnson was not paying any particular attention to his surroundings as he walked down the hall. Not to the cinderblock wall painted in an easy-to-clean high gloss white, not to the well-polished but bland beige linoleum tile tinted slightly green by the overhead fluorescents.

The network had been acting up again. Plus — and he was sure to be pulled into this — a small amount of data had gone inexplicably missing. Johnson was hoping it was simply wear and tear on equipment that had been sourced to the lowest bidder, rather than something stemming from another security hole. He was one of the few people still working on this system that even remembered the last time there had been a security breach, and the fact that he'd been able to keep his job had only reflected his utter lack of real authority at that time. He had no time to notice a hallway he'd walked down thousands of times before; his mind was entirely caught up in sorting the possibilities and making a plan of attack. So it was a wonder he even noticed the soft giggle from the custodian's supply room.

His first impulse was to keep walking. Yes, of course there were rules and regulations about sexual conduct, but none of them were more important than figuring out what was wrong with the network right now. But then the soft giggle came again and it didn't _sound_ like something sexual.

When Johnson opened the door, there was Major Williams propped up against the neatly ordered rows of toilet paper and cleaning products, giggling softly to himself. Shit. There was no way he could get away with not doing something about this.

It took a short while for Johnson to extricate himself from the ensuing hubbub. But once he did, he felt he at least had an end to the tangle, something that might lead him through to the relevant problems. The log showed Williams had used the retina scan to enter the control room at 03:00 and left at 04:42, even though he was supposed to be on vacation. He and "the new guy — Williams introduced us" had relieved the two people who were in there, who had only been in the room in case anything went unexpectedly wrong. They had other things they could be doing if there didn't need to be someone in the control room at all times.

The "new guy" was "taller than Brady, shorter than Olsen" (so 5'9" to 6'2"), "youngish" to "sorta middle aged I guess", and "fishbelly white" with short, dark hair and "weird" eyes. He had to be the hacker. How Williams had got him past the double fences and the guard with a machine gun would be interesting to hear, but it wasn't Johnson's problem.

After that it was much more straightforward (though tedious) to track down what had been going on. It looked like the hacker had been after major computing power and specialized software rather than government secrets. Someone had used their system to hack into a health care consortium and wipe records.

Johnson felt a little shiver of dread when he realized that the hacked consortium was the one his girlfriend Amanda worked at. He hoped the break-in wasn't going to cause any trouble that would fall on her.

The hacker had also pulled a couple of tricks with the facility's own security system, tracks covered, some records wiped. The problems they had experienced afterward were the result of the guy leaving quickly with things half-done and wrapped up hurriedly. Something must have startled him.

Johnson could see that there was going to be a long line of meetings about making their security system accessible enough to be dealt with from other facilities while simultaneously unable to be cracked by their own computers, which were, after all, there to crack things. He preemptively took some headache tablets.

The good news was that their system didn't appear to be otherwise compromised. He wondered if that would make a difference to his employment prospects. He wondered if he should have just worked on his father's boat instead of going on to college. Johnson tidied up, buckled down, and prepared for the firestorm.

By the time he got home, more than ready to stop being 'Captain Johnson' for a while and go back to being 'Nate', it was achingly late and he was surprised to see the lights on. Amanda's old Civic was parked in the driveway, but not as carefully as usual. He had to verge slightly into the yard to get around her into his parking space, wheels sinking into the mud left by the most recent summer thunderstorms, narrowly avoiding the strip of daisies that lined the drive. It would be hours before the pre-dawn birds started singing, but the nocturnal creatures had already quieted. As Nate entered the house, the early morning air was humid, still, and silent.

Amanda was sitting on the couch in front of the television set, channel tuned to the news but set on mute. Her face was puffy and tracked with tears, and a box of tissues was at her side. "We lost a patient yesterday morning, Nate, just after midnight."

Nate sat beside her and pulled her into his arms. It hadn't been her shift, so if it was hitting her this strongly she probably knew the patient well or felt some responsibility. "I'm so sorry, honey. Had he been there long?"

"No!" Amanda reached for a tissue and blew her nose. "We _lost_ lost him. We can't find him anywhere. We can't even find his records, and people are saying it probably has something to do with all _this_!" She gestured toward the television and then buried her face in her hands as she started crying in earnest.

As Nate reached to grab the remote off the coffee table, the television showed a recording of a woman in a suit and lab coat standing in front of the hospital where Amanda worked, talking with the press. The lab coat was obvious staging, but it did signal that it was someone associated with the hospital. The caption in the corner of the screen read

ORGAN THEFT RING RUN OUT OF LOCAL HOSPITAL  
---  
  
Nate took the sound off mute.

"...But there is no reason to believe that any of the nurses were complicit with Dr. Hanson's actions, had any knowledge of them, or displayed other than the most attentive care to their duties."

The speaker turned a page and ignored questions shouted by the media. "Due to medical confidentiality, we cannot release the names of the patients involved; however, their families have been contacted. We are cooperating fully with the police investigation and our own investigation is underway. Other than that, we have no comment at this time."

The newscaster came on and bantered with his partner before the topic turned to the most recent standoffs in Congress, and Nate switched the TV off.

Amanda leaned into the hug just a little more. "Remember that man I told you about a week ago? Showed up in the E.R. and just lapsed into a coma suddenly while he was waiting?"

Nate nodded. "Yes." She wasn't being terribly strict about following the medical confidentiality practices, but he knew that she only told him these things, and he wasn't telling anyone.

"We couldn't figure out who he was or why he was in a coma. Probably drugs. He had old track marks. But the lab results weren't showing anything for the standard substances. The MRI didn't show any damage, no signs of head trauma since he was a child. The office checked everything they could find — scars, birthmarks, blood type, description — against the missing person reports. Dr. Hanson even sent off for a D.N.A. test, but of course that wasn't back yet."

She looked blank for a moment. She was obviously still taking a bit to process things. Then she pulled herself together, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. "Did you hear about Dr. Hanson?"

When Nate shook his head she continued.

"Dr. Hanson ordered D.N.A. tests routinely. I don't know how he got it paid for. But the police are sure it was because he was stealing kidneys from coma patients. Nobody knew. Well, somebody knew. I didn't know. They're still trying to... anyway, so we had this mystery coma patient there just long enough to be transferred to the coma ward for longer term observation and he _vanished_ , so far as we can tell. Dr. Hanson isn't talking. We're worried that the mystery patient might have died on the table. And get this — his records vanished. All of them, even on the lab computers! All we have is what we remember."

She picked up a newspaper and showed him a missing person's report with a sketch. "This is what we were able to put together for the police sketch." The man had an underdefined jawline, dark hair, pale skin, and eyes that looked a little odd. "I'm sure the eyes are off. Nobody remembered him with them open."

An accompanying description mentioned childhood trauma to the skull, a tonsillectomy, and that he was roughly six feet tall with an estimated age of mid-thirties. Nate thought of the mystery hacker who'd caused so much trouble, but Nate had even more reason than Amanda to be close-mouthed about what went on at work. And he couldn't be certain anyway. So he took Amanda off to bed and held her close until the alarm went off way too soon.

It didn't take terribly long for the police and the hospital to figure out exactly what had been going on with the organ theft and who had been involved; bureaucracy might have provided a handy way for Dr. Hanson to shuffle what he'd been doing into the normal traffic of the hospital but, with the exception of that one patient, it had left a huge and inescapable "paper trail". His accomplices were arrested, several managers at both the hospital and corporate levels were on administrative leave pending the results of internal investigations, and the management that was left was "instituting new workflow procedures" and "implementing best practices in communications" while scrambling to bring possibly temporary replacements up to speed. Amanda's own work swiftly fell back into normal patterns. But neither the identity nor the fate of the mystery coma patient was ever determined.

And five weeks later it turned out that Johnson was keeping his job, though there were some days when he wished he hadn't. Major Williams, who not only had been taking drugs during his vacation but had, in a spirit of congenial comradery, taken one of his new friends from a bar off to see the computer facilities, was decidedly _not_ keeping his job. Every single facet of security was being reevaluated. Every single piece of equipment was being inventoried and tested. Johnson gazed over his cubicle wall at the hallway that in some way symbolized escape, thought of being out on his father's boat in the cold and the storm, and burrowed back into his paperwork.

* * *

Sherlock was taking the train into London, just another early morning commuter in a mid-price suit. His subtle makeup made his jawline bolder, and his carefully chosen glasses de-accentuated his eyes, in which he wore contact lenses painted with a completely different iris pattern. He'd slightly altered the shape of his ears, since ear shape is unique and the last thing he wanted right now was to be identified. He was slouched, his hair dyed a dirty blond, and he had a roll of padding around the middle disguising a few necessary supplies.

It was one of his more thorough disguises. At this point he'd had years of practice. He was reasonably sure his own mother would have struggled to recognize him.

A familiar short, graying blond leaned against the seat next to him, opened a newspaper in a way that hid his face, and said "Good to see you again." The newspaper did not betray the slightest tremor. There was no cane to be seen.

"So," John continued, "Where are we going now?"


End file.
